Rachel Dickstein is a director, writer and choreographer of opera, theatre, and dance-based performance. She founded the Obie-winning theatre company Ripe Time in 2000 to develop and produce ensemble-based, embodied adaptations from literature. Recent work with Ripe Time includes Compass (ASU Gammage), Haruki Murakami’s Sleep (BAM Next Wave Festival, Yale Rep, Annenberg), The World Is Round (BAM-Fisher, Obie Award), and Septimus And Clarissa (Drama Desk, Drama League nominations, BPAC).
Dickstein also specializes in bringing her signature visual aesthetic to directing new plays, chamber opera and new music theatre including the upcoming Star Singer (LA Opera, BMP/Prototype). She is an associate professor, and Chair of Theatre and Performance at Purchase College, SUNY and is the author of Towards Embodied Performance: Directing and the Art of Composition (Routledge 2024). She holds a B.A. from Yale College.
At MacDowell, she will work on In[Finite] Time, an original music theatre work (with music by Grammy winning composer Rinde Eckert) loosely based on Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse that follows a father and a daughter navigating illness and the power of poetry to heal. She held several video meetings with designer Anna Kiraly to develop the visual/architectural world in tandem with the writing process.
Dickstein took several days mid residency to work on writing another new piece, WomenWaterRising, a new installation/dance/song cycle she is building with composer Jean Rohe and installation artist/projects designer Hana S. Kim. This piece is loosely based on Clarice Lispector's short story "Waters of the World" and draws parallels between rising sea levels and water related climate change to the oppression of female -identified bodies.
